Menu

B is for Black (& White)

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos on my computer. Only a small percentage of them are in black and white. It’s trivial to convert a color image to black and white, but I love color, so even if I have an image that screams black & white, I have a resistance to converting it.

But there are exceptions. Sometimes the textures and shapes in a picture are so strong that color actually detracts from the image. For today’s Blogging from A to Z post, I’m going with a photo gallery of black & white images. I suppose some might think I’m cheating because today’s B’s day and I’m sort of including a W word. If you’re a purist, I hope you’ll forgive me.

All images were taken and edited by me. In case that wasn’t already clear.

I’m desperately searching for a Mae West-type quip to reply to the “purist” line, but I’m too distracted by the beauty of your photographs to come up with anything.

The wheat/feather (?) picture reminds me of a product review on Photobots. Stand back — I’m going to pretend to know what I’m talking about: they posted a review of a camera that takes photos that allow the viewer to change the focus, such that one viewing your wheat-feather could direct the cursor to something in the background and shift the focus.

I hadn’t heard about the camera that can take changeable-focus photos, but that sounds cool. I know what you mean about that picture though. I must have taken it with a really long focal length to have such a shallow depth of field. Kind of a trippy effect.

It took me awhile to learn different techniques for converting color to b&w. It definitely takes some experimentation. Using Photoshop helps since there are so many different ways of doing the conversion and each method gives slightly different results.